what do we do with the vacuum she leaves behind
the space of our mind and hearts that she occupied

what do we do with the questions we still have for her
where are the answers we relied on

gone in mid-sentence

hmmmm

I should be blogging about the vancouver conference I guess…

but am having too good a time not blogging;-)

DEADLINE EXTENDED:

PLEASE SUBMIT ABSTRACTS BY DECEMBER 1, 2007.

Title: Everyday 3D Lives: Digital Embodiment, Performativity and Globalization

Editor : Radhika Gajjala

[ http://personal.bgsu.edu/~radhik ]

In the recent past, there has been much talk of “web 2.0 “ and “web 3D” as new media. Educators and researchers all over the world are debating the pros and cons of such environments. MMORPGs (Massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games) such as World of Warcraft (WoW) and online 3D environments for social and economic activity. Immersive environments such as secondlife are being examined from multiple disciplinary lenses. This edited will include articles based in examinations of embodiment, performativity, gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality and globalization critically, and will be open to multiple disciplinary intersections.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures and connections emerge in relation to embodiment, identity and globalization specifically in 3D environment (such as secondlife) and MMORPGs? Researchers examining presence and absence or voice and voicelessness are increasingly mobilized to speak of identities emerging online, while binaries such as embodied/disembodied and global/local are deployed unproblematically in both utopian and dystopian viewpoints regarding the Internet. Performativity begins to shape exposure and privacy. Thus while claims are being made that the Internet is a “public sphere” in a Habermasian sense (Poster 1995) corporate privation and surveillance comes upon us in Internet mediated environments and we learn to negotiate our speaking within interstices of presences and absences, cooperation and isolation, community engagement and individual consumerism. Simultaneously hegemonic structures invested in particular ideologies of globalization and “free” markets learn to co-opt diverse identities and voices. Voice thus becomes a strategic construct in both cases. Notions of voice/voiceless and empowerment/participation in such instances are appropriated by status quo discourses and are themselves mobilized for the oppression of the subaltern (Gajjala, forthcoming 2008).

In the book on “Pedagogies of the Global”, the editor, Arif Dirlik writes that

“Rather than erase difference by converting all to Euro/American norms of modernity, however, capitalist modernity, as it has gone global, has empowered societies once theoretically condemned to premodernity or tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very tradition to make their own claims on modernity on the basis of those very traditions, as filtered through experiences of colonialism, neocolonialism, or simple marginalization by the forces of globalization “(Dirlik, 2006, 3).

Digital media plays a significant role in aiding these connections and shaping these re-presentations. I am interested in research that examines these connections, representations and productions through critical theoretical lenses based in postcolonial theories, feminist theories, critical race theories and so on.

500 word abstracts due by December 1, 2007 and full articles of no more than 8000 words length due by September 2008.

Email me with any queries – radhika@cyberdiva.org.

I watched how you are preparing for this unimaginable journey of yours

the celestial sailboats – nay Kayaks and rafts – are floating by your house…

as you give away worldly goods once precious to you

now

precious
to me

I watched you calmly smile at me and hand me objects

that but for you
would have no meaning for me

How can I wear these I thought
in a fleeting moment

without my heart breaking each time I wear them

How can you smile at me and still be so calm in your opinions and suggestions

How can you still be the one to guide me

How can I be still taking from you

as you leave us all….

But there on the banks of the Maumee river

it was always an auspicious place

you pointed outside your window to your beloved trees and talked of how you suddenly notice how much they’ve grown over the years – seeming to tell me to take the time for such things

yet again

mentoring me in how to live my life

as you have done

I have always leaned on you

expected you to help clear my doubts as I balance my work and life…

I still lean on you…

I expected to come to you for many things – to learn

as the years passed

I imagined sharing stories with you

and laughing

but one thing I never did expect from you

nor hope for

that you would teach me

that you would teach me

how to

die….

anyway – am working on copyright issues to do with images in the edited collection – while I crochet – and got to wondering about the layers of creation and the individual nature of copyright….

again.